The New Yorker THE LONG WAR OF JOHN KERRY by JOE KLEIN Can a Massachusetts Brahmin become President? Posted 11-25-2002 On a rainy October morning, the day after Senator John Forbes Kerry, of Massachusetts, an- nounced that he would reluctantly vote to give President George W. Bush the authority to use lethal force against Iraq, the Senator sat in his Capitol Hill office reminiscing about another war and another speech. The war was Vietnam. The speech was one he had delivered upon graduating from Yale, in 1966. Kerry was twenty-two at the time; he had already enlisted in the Navy. As one of Yale’s champion debaters and president of the Political Union, he had been selected to deliver the Class Oration, traditionally an Ivy-draped nostalgia piece. But the speech he gave, hastily rewritten at the last moment, was anything but traditional: it was a broad, passionate criticism of American foreign policy, including the war that he would soon be fighting. I’d been trying to get a copy of this speech for several weeks, but Kerry’s staff had been un- able to find one. There seemed a parallel—at least, a convenient journalistic analogy—to his statement the day before about Iraq: two questionable wars, both of which Kerry had decid- ed to support, conditionally, even as he raised serious doubts about their propriety. Kerry bristled at the analogy. He assumed that a familiar accusation was inherent in the com- parison: that he was guilty of speaking boldly but acting politically. And it is true that from his earliest days in public life—a career that seems to have begun in prep school—even John Kerry’s closest friends have teased him about his overactive sense of destiny, his theatrical sense of gravitas, and his initials, which are the same as John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s. “I signed up for the Navy in 1965, the year before the Class Oration,” Kerry said now, with quiet vehe- mence. He repeated it, for emphasis: “I signed up for the Navy. There was very little thought of Vietnam. It seemed very far away. There was no connection between my decision to serve and the speech I made.” But there was a connection, of sorts. Kerry had made the decision along with three close friends, classmates and fellow-members of Yale’s not so secret society, Skull and Bones: David Thorne, Richard Pershing, and Frederick Smith. All came from families with strong traditions of military and public service. Pershing was the grandson of General John Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in the First World War. (Richard Persh- ing was killed during the Tet offensive.) “Our decisions were all about our sense of duty,” Fred Smith, who went on to found Federal Express, recalls. “We were the Kennedy generation— you know, ‘Pay any price, bear any burden.’ That was the ethos.” The week before John Kerry delivered the Class Oration, the fifteen Skull and Bones se- niors went off on a final jaunt together to a fishing camp on an island in the St. Lawrence River. Fred Smith remembers spending the days idly, playing cards and drinking beer. David Thorne, however, says that there was a serious running discussion about Vietnam. “There were four of us going to war in a matter of months. That tends to concentrate the mind. This may have been the first time we really seriously began to question Vietnam. It was: ‘Hey, what the hell is going on over there? What the hell are we in for?’ “ Kerry’s reaction to these discussions was intense and precipitate. He decided to rewrite the 1 of 17 speech. His original address, which can still be found in the 1966 Yale yearbook, was “rather sophomoric,” he recalled. “I decided that I couldn’t give that speech. I couldn’t get up there and go through that claptrap. I remember there was no electricity in the cabin. I remem- ber staying up with a candle writing my speech in the wee hours of the night, rewriting and rewriting. It reflected what I felt and what we were all thinking about. It got an incredible reception, a standing ovation.” The Senator and I were sitting in wing chairs in his office, which is rather more elegant than those of his peers—the walls painted Chinese red with a dark lacquer glaze and covered with nineteenth-century nautical prints. There is a marble fireplace, a couch, a coffee table, the wing chairs: in sum, a room with a distinct sensibility, a reserved and private place. Kerry seemed weary. Our conversation was interrupted, from time to time, by phone calls from his supporters—most of whom seemed unhappy about his Iraq vote. At one point, he had to rush over to the Senate chamber to vote on another issue. When he returned, we began to talk about his time in Vietnam. He served as the captain of a small “swift boat,” ferrying troops up the rivers of the Mekong Delta. He was wounded three times in four months, and then sent home—the policy in Vietnam was three wounds and you’re out. He received a Bronze Star, for saving the life of a Special Forces lieutenant who had fallen overboard during a firefight, and a Silver Star. The latter, a medal awarded only for significant acts of courage, was the result of a three-boat counterattack Kerry had led against a Vietcong position on a riverbank. He had chased down, shot, and killed a man that day. The man had been carrying a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher. “You want to see what one of those can do to a boat?” he asked. “A couple of weeks after I left Vietnam, a swift boat captained by my close friend Don Droz—we called him Dinky—got hit with a B-40. He was killed. I still have the photo here somewhere.” Kerry began to rummage around his desk and eventually pulled out a manila folder. “Here it is,” he said. The boat was mangled beyond recognition. “Oh my, look at this!” He held up a sheaf of yellowed, double-spaced, typewritten pages. It looked like an old college term paper, taken from a three-ring binder. “It’s the original copy of my Class Oration. What on earth is it doing here?” He sat down again and studied the speech, transfixed. Then he began to read it aloud, curi- ous, nostalgic, embarrassed by, and yet impressed with, his undergraduate eloquence. He read several pages. Worried looks passed between the two staff members who were in the room: Was he going to read the whole damn thing? “ ‘It is misleading to mention right and wrong in this issue, for to every thinking man, the semantics of this contest often find the United States right in its wrongness and wrong in its rightness,’ “ he read, swiftly, without oratorical flourish. “ ‘Neither am I arguing against the war itself. I am criticizing the pro- pensity—the ease—which the United States has for getting into this kind of situation—’ “ He stopped and looked up, shaking his head, “Boy, was I a sophisticated nabob!” The two staff members exhaled. “You have to laugh at this now. Do I even want this out?” But he continued reading, unable to stop himself. He skipped several pages in the middle, then recited the entire peroration. The Class Oration says a lot about John Kerry, who will soon announce his intention to run for President of the United States. It is a nuanced assessment of American foreign policy at a crossroads—delivered at a moment when the political leaders of the country should have been questioning basic assumptions but weren’t. Kerry did, however—a year before the antiwar movement began to gather strength and coherence. The speech was notable for its 2 of 17 central thesis: “The United States must . bring itself to understand that the policy of inter- vention”—against Communism—”that was right for Western Europe does not and cannot find the same application to the rest of the world.” Kerry went on: In most emerging nations, the spectre of imperialist capitalism stirs as much fear and ha- tred as that of communism. To compound the problem, we continue to push forward our will only as we see it and in a fashion that only leads to more mistakes and deeper commitment. Where we should have instructed, it seems we did not; where we should have been patient, it seems we were not; where we should have stayed clear, it seems we would not. Never in the last twenty years has the government of the United States been as isolated as it is today. There is, nonetheless, something slightly off-putting about the speech. The portentous qual- ity, the hijacking of Kennedyesque tics and switchbacks (“Where we should have instructed . .”), the absence of irony, the absence of any sort of joy—all these rankle, and in a familiar way. This has been the knock against John Kerry for the past thirty years, ever since he cap- tured the nation’s attention as the spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a group whose members staged a dramatic protest in Washington in April of 1971, camping out on the Mall and tossing their medals and combat ribbons onto the Capitol steps. He seemed the world’s oldest twenty-seven-year-old that week, even though he was dressed in scruffy combat fatigues, his extravagant thatch of black hair gleaming, flopping over his ears and eyebrows—he looked a bit like the pre-hallucinogenic George Harrison.